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Design Submission Guidelines: 10 Things to Avoid

18 Mar 2015

You’ve worked on your design and you’re ready to submit it. You click the ‘Submit’ button and hey presto, your design is live. All good, right? But when you check a few hours later, your design has been eliminated.

What went wrong? Either the client wanted a different concept, or CrowdStudio’s curation team decided it was not up to the mark. Here are the reasons why your design might have been removed:

Breaking The 10 Commandments (Don’t Even Think About It)

When you joined CrowdStudio, we sent you a link to the 10 commandments for designers. We expect you to strictly follow these rules. Breaking them might result your designs getting eliminated. Repeatedly breaking the rules might even get you banned.

Copying the top-rated submissions

It is tempting to look at the top rated designs, and submit new designs using the same concept. Stealing from someone else's work to save effort is never okay. Always submit fresh ideas. We will eliminate designs that are just copies of the top rated designs.

Lack of visual appeal

You can submit a plain design if the client wants it. Else, we recommend presenting the design using a mockup to show how it would look on different materials and mediums in the real world. There are many online design resources where you can get high quality mockups for free.

Poor usage of colors, color combinations and gradients

Poor usage of fonts

There are an estimated 265,978 fonts out there, so don’t use cliched ones like Impact or Arial all the time. They are overused for a good reason, but the design needs to look fresh.

Too many submissions

Rule of thumb: You can submit a maximum of 10 concepts in a contest. You can submit different iterations of a concept if the client asks for it. But you shouldn’t flood the contest with iterations of the same concept. Aside from monotony, it lowers the overall quality and confuses the client.

Low resolution/pixelated images

You know better than that. But some technical issues might happen which mess up the quality of the work. In such cases, please contact support@crowdstudio.in.

Use of stock vector images

It’s okay to use them except for logo design contests. But some clients are cool with a stock vector for the logo, so use them if you have the commercial license. In such cases, we recommend notifying the client and providing a link to the image - if you don’t and we find out, chances are that you’ll be labelled as a fraud, even if you have the license.

Complaints in the comment section

Good attitude is as important as good design. Refrain from complaints in the comments section. When you want to report or complain about a design, use the 'Report design' feature.

Disrespect to other designers and clients

This is an online platform, so your actions will get noticed. You don’t want to be known as "that jackass designer", do you?

The more you avoid these mistakes, the higher your chances of winning. Even if you don’t win, make these guidelines a part of your life. Create a body of work you can be happy about so that one day, you can look back on your designs and be satisfied that you’ve done a good job